19 August 2009 4:48 PM

Journey to the Centre of the Earth

No, actually I am not going to discuss Jules Verne's classic - which I read avidly when I was nine or ten years old, together with '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’ (my favourite) and ‘Around the World in 80 Days’. Though I will digress briefly because the thought of Jules Verne triggers a memory that makes me marvel, when I look at these books now, that a child of that age should have coped with Verne's prose. I also wonder how I got on so happily with Arthur Conan Doyle's great historical novels, 'Sir Nigel' and 'The White Company'. I don't think you could get any boy of today, however bookishly brought up, to read these great stories, which were very definitely written with boys, not girls, in mind. I still enjoy them, and passages from them are written on my heart, inextricably connected with memories of long-ago winter afternoons in the firelight, with rain lashing against the windows (perfect reading weather) and my imagination at full-power. But I come from the very last bit of the tail-end of what was essentially a Victorian culture. The language we now speak has become too denuded and bare, the country itself has become bland and disconnected from its past so that Nigel Loring and Samkin Aylward seem preposterous, impossible figures, which they did not to me. And so something has vanished from the atmosphere and mood of Britain, so that such things simply no longer have any appeal.

No, my mention of ‘The Centre’ concerns a comment by Mr Terry O'Brien, on the 18th August at 1.36 pm, in which he responded thus to my posting on ‘Marxists, terror, war and the real nature of New Labour’:

‘This blog seems to be the preserve of fantasists and right wing conspiracy types. Maybe 20 or so of you in total. All believing that your witterings will achieve something or change peoples' minds. Labour are a party of the centre left, Conservatives the centre right. There's a huge overlap. No extreme ideologies, disguised or otherwise. The Lib Dems are not much different. You 20 unfortunately won't find a home for your views in these parties. That's as it should be in a democracy - they are parties of the centre, with mass appeal. If you 20 wanted to form a party and vote for it, then go ahead. But there's really no need to pretend in your frustration that the reason your views are not espoused by the main parties is due to any kind of conspiracy. It's because they are unusual views, which many people would regard as paranoid and dangerous. So here's to a normal, centrist, real-world winner at the next election, be it Tories or Labour, and on with the genuine policy debates which need to be had. And no more crackpot theories, please!!’

Well, at least it's better than the remarks of Oliver Wessex, who so completely misses the point that he sums up my argument as: ’So, yesterday's reds are today's conservatives’, which is pretty much the opposite of what I actually say. And it appears to offer me some chance to respond, unlike Mr ‘Tarquin’, who said: ‘Well it started out fine, but then it turned into how should I put it?...Mad raving. You sound like a paranoid old man, pining for the days of old where everything was perfect.‘

That was just abuse. Where precisely did the article turn into what he says it is? Which facts or arguments in it does he dismiss? Is Mr Tarquin a qualified psychiatrist? No wonder he hides behind this silly name. He can't argue, so he just makes rude noises, like a child. And leaves me free to say so. I really can do without this sort of infantile non-responsive stuff.

Oh, and I'd also like to respond to ‘Crumblekid’ who said: ’I listened to the Joe Slovo programme. It went to some lengths to say that the South African CP was a very different beast from its European cousins. So your appellation of 'Stalinist' feels a little misplaced.’ Yes, it did go to some lengths to *assert* this highly questionable argument. But, as I said, the programme lacked a critical voice, who could have pointed out that the SACP was in fact the most Stalinist CP in the world (backing the invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan) and pointing out that many anti-Apartheid whites existed and campaigned outside the CP. Matthew Parris, the BBC's idea of what a conservative ought to be like, failed completely to make any of these points. So I made them for him. Do look up the history of the SACP, rather than taking its own apologists' word for what happened.

Mr ‘Kid’ then went on to say: ‘I've no time for Ainsworth but to suggest he's a closet revolutionary is simply laughable. By their deeds they shall be judged. He's fighting a colonial war!’ My argument is not that Mr Ainsworth is a 'closet revolutionary' but that New Labour is a New left government which has realised that the revolutionary aims of the New Left can now be achieved by lawful means.

On the colonial war question, others have rightly pointed out that revolutionaries can fight colonial wars. But I'd take a different line. The British presence in Afghanistan, like our interventions in Yugoslavia and Iraq are absolutely not colonial. They're globalist, anti-sovereignty and liberal. Neither Britain nor the USA have any declared or undeclared colonial ambitions in the Balkans, Iraq or Afghanistan.

Then he says: ’Re terrorism being justified: almost the entire British Empire would still be intact were it not for people fighting for their liberation.’ This is untrue. The British Empire collapsed because of our historic defeat by the Japanese at Singapore in 1942, after which we had lost the invincibility needed to possess a widespread empire with very little force. Despite our eventual physical defeat of the Japanese, we never recovered our authority. We were also penniless and under huge American pressure to quit. We lost Ireland because of our stupidity in hanging the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, after which many formerly pro-British Irish Roman Catholics chose independence. As for Boadicea (where did this weird word 'Boudicca' come from?) I thought she was a lawful monarch, fighting legitimately against a foreign invader.

And then there's Mr Sydney, who complains: ’This blog is just lifted from the overlong (longer than most of the chapters) preface to your book 'The Broken Compass'. Nothing new to say? Or rather, nothing interesting to say?‘ To which I say, I'm glad he has read the book, and impressed that he has done so, if (as it appears) he regards my ideas as uninteresting. But I can't assume everyone here has. I would add that it is not 'lifted' which suggests that the text has been lazily cut and pasted. I wrote it, here at my desk in Kensington, for the occasion, and never once consulted or copied from my book while doing so. I think he's referring to my references to the way in which reporters missed the significance of the 'Internationale' at two major New Labour funerals. Well, it is interesting and I'll no doubt return to it again, as it has a double point. One, it happened. Two, the ill-informed press pack didn't get it. Once you have grasped both of these points, you are on the way.

And there is plenty in it which simply couldn't have been in a book which I finished writing last Spring. Mr Ainsworth's attendance at IMG meetings, and Mr Miliband's apology for terror were both unknown to me when I wrote the book. Nor is there any rule known to me about how long chapters or introductions or forewords or prefaces can be. They're arbitrary divisions. What is the point of this snide spite? If he disagrees with me, he should say why, and then I can argue.

But back to Mr O' Brien. Let us recall once more what he said, since it is fascinating to see such a fine example of such thought, netted from the depths of the ocean of debate and now lying here, gleaming on its slab. Pause, and admire:

‘This blog seems to be the preserve of fantasists and right wing conspiracy types. Maybe 20 or so of you in total. All believing that your witterings (is that East or West Wittering, by the way? I always preferred West Wittering, myself) will achieve something or change peoples' minds. Labour are a party of the centre left, Conservatives the centre right. There's a huge overlap. No extreme ideologies, disguised or otherwise. The Lib Dems are not much different. You 20 unfortunately won't find a home for your views in these parties. That's as it should be in a democracy - they are parties of the centre, with mass appeal. If you 20 wanted to form a party and vote for it, then go ahead. But there's really no need to pretend in your frustration that the reason your views are not espoused by the main parties is due to any kind of conspiracy. It's because they are unusual views, which many people would regard as paranoid and dangerous. So here's to a normal, centrist, real-world winner at the next election, be it Tories or Labour, and on with the genuine policy debates which need to be had. And no more crackpot theories, please!!’

Let us prepare the scaly monster for the table, slice by slice. The opening sentence is just abuse. I try to keep reasonably open house here, the boundaries being English Law and coherence. No doubt the occasional fantasist wanders by. This is a hard charge to define anyway. Some people (I will come to this) might see Mr O'Brien as a fantasist himself. The use of the phrase 'conspiracy theory' is also not as devastating as he thinks it is. It is dealt with at length in my book 'The Broken Compass' (not reproduced here) and one point that I make there is that a better word for 'conspiracy' in modern British politics would be 'lunch'. I am a great lunch theorist myself. Dinner is even more effective. People do get together in private to plan concerted actions which are more effective precisely because the public doesn't know they are concerted. I have taken part in such things myself, but would add that I don't now. It is perfectly reasonable to assume they are going on, and actually rather silly to imagine they are not.

Nor should Mr O'Brien judge the readership of the blog by its contributors. There are a number of regular contributors here, which I think is common on most sites, and they sometimes go whirling off into individual or collective side-arguments - presumably because they enjoy them. Also there are a number of occasional and one-off ones. There are also a sizeable number who read but do not comment, whose views we cannot know. Quite a lot of people come here, as Mr O'Brien does, to disagree with me - some of them rather more effectively than he does.

Now here it comes, the meat of it. ‘Labour are a party of the centre left, Conservatives the centre right. There's a huge overlap. No extreme ideologies, disguised or otherwise. The Lib Dems are not much different. You 20 unfortunately won't find a home for your views in these parties.’

This is presented as if it is an argument. But it is not. It is an assertion, based upon nothing but the writer's own opinions, which he does not try to justify with any facts, or any logic. What it says to begin with is: ‘There is a dominant ideology. You are not part of it’. So far so good. I'd more or less agree. But it goes on to assert, without any attempt to reason, that this is self-evidently a good thing. It also implies that the opposite of the dominant 'centre' is 'extreme'. And it acquits the centre of having any 'extreme' ideology. This is essentially circular. 'Centre' means 'good', or what Mr O'Brien thinks is good. 'Extreme' means 'bad', or what Mr O'Brien thinks is bad. But how do we tell which is which? Is the 'centre' in power because it is good? Or is it able to proclaim its (alleged) goodness unchallenged because it is in power, not just in government but in the educational, cultural and media fortresses which filter and classify opinions?

Mr O'Brien is actually making an enormous statement, full of meaning, without apparently even realising it. None of his terms is defined. What does he mean by 'centre-right' and 'centre-left'. What, come to that, does he mean by 'right' or 'left'? Who has decided that the ideas which do indeed dominate the main political parties are legitimate (or 'central') and that other ideas are illegitimate (or 'extremist')? Isn't it odd that one of these supposedly moderate parties a) contains large numbers of people in senior positions who were open to revolutionary Marxist ideas earlier in their lives, b) that these individuals are highly unwilling to discuss this and c) that the policies in practice of the 'Centre-Left' Labour government include: The militant pursuit of equality of outcome (this is a specifically socialist objective quite distinct from the attempt to create equality of opportunity which was the general aim until recently) through the education system; the observance of the view that crime is a symptom of poverty and deprivation by the criminal justice system; the suppression of the teaching of patriotic national history; the surrender of national sovereignty at every available opportunity; the break-up of the federal United Kingdom into semi-autonomous states; the aggrandisement of the executive at the expense of parliament; the politicisation of the civil service; the politicisation of the police; the politicisation of the judiciary; the teaching of sexual licence in schools; the passing of legislation and regulations which specifically prohibit the exercise of a Christian conscience (in, for instance, adoption), the removal of the exclusive privileges of heterosexual marriage, the deliberate confusion of monoculturalism with racial bigotry. I could go on. I no doubt will go on later. Speaking as a graduate of the sixties cultural revolution, I can tell you that, were I still what I was then, I would both welcome all these things and recognise them as the fulfilment - far more than I could have dreamed of back in 1970 - of many of my objectives.

Others have dealt with the claim that the dying centre parties have 'mass-appeal'. This is simply untrue, and could only be said by someone who isn't paying attention, and who doesn't read the actual details of opinion polls, only the summaries. Without ladles of public money, which is already paid to them, the support of dodgy millionaires and their monopoly of airtime, the 'centre' parties would have even less support than they do, which is now below 50 per cent of the electorate.

I can't be bothered to go, yet again, over the ground about how, in a two-party system, one party has to collapse before there is room for a new one. But then there's this smug, pipe-sucking sneer: ’But there's really no need to pretend in your frustration that the reason your views are not espoused by the main parties is due to any kind of conspiracy. It's because they are unusual views, which many people would regard as paranoid and dangerous. So here's to a normal, centrist, real-world winner at the next election, be it Tories or Labour, and on with the genuine policy debates which need to be had. And no more crackpot theories, please!!’

The article which provoked this intervention specifically pointed out that the things which had changed the country had been done in the open, not by conspiracies, and that gullible or lazy or incurious journalists hadn't noticed what was in front of their noses. The views which now dominate public debate in this country were once 'unusual' too. Now they are usual, modish and generally adopted, without much thought, by a large number of people brought up during their dominance. Being unusual didn't make them wrong, and being usual doesn't make them right. That is decided elsewhere. Those who held them, once a minority, fought until they had won. Why shouldn't others do the same? And what 'genuine policy debates' does Mr O'Brien wish to see, when the 'centre' parties he so much admires have no fundamental disagreements? I don't think he has thought about this matter at all. In sum, his posting could be boiled down to: ’I don't agree with you, so you must be wrong. Yah boo! Crackpot!‘ Try to argue like a grown-up, Mr O'Brien. Imagine what it would feel like if it was your most cherished beliefs that were airily dismissed by the BBC as 'extremist’, ‘crackpot’ or ‘paranoid’. And that those who said this clearly hadn't read what you'd written with any care, or listened to what you'd said with any attention.

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Boudicca or, more properly, Boudica, is a proto-Celtic word meaning 'victorious'. Boadicea is a mutation that is believed to have originated in a botched transcription of Tacitus' Annals. The same book contains other variants, as does Cassius Dio's Roman History.

Your tone when discussing the name Boudicca - "where did this weird word... come from?" - sounded as though you thought it a piece of modern-day, perhaps even liberal, revisionism. This is probably cynicism on my part, in which I hope you'll forgive me for indulging. Rest assured that the knowledge that 'Boudica' is the correct spelling is a good hundred years old (according to my tutor in Latin literature). On a personal note, my mother tells me that she was taught 'Boudica, not Boadicea' when she was at school in the early 1960s.

Boudicca, which indicates the she pronounced it & if that does not make it real then there is no correct spelling, was not a "lawful monarch fighting an invader" but an unlawful monarch. This is because (A) the British tribes had properly submitted to Roman sovereignty & (B) because her husband had already left ownership of the Iceni to the Emperor, in the unwise hope that such loyalty would make them first among subject tribes.

Of course all such legal arguments are fictions but that applies to all arguments that "legitimate " states are inherently more legitimate than their less established enemies & that such legitimacy can be bestowed by either the UN or the assembly of leaders of tribes.

"If any reader is learning a foreign language and has got a fair grip on grammar and a moderate vocabulary already under his belt, so to speak, may I recommend first tackling in the language concerned little magazines like Mickey Mouse, Pluto and Donald Duck (in Italian, for example, Donald Duck is "Paperino)"

A fine recommendation if I may say. I do the same with Italian and also purchased cheap Winnie-the Pooh books when I was in Japan in order to study the characters better.

Not only that but I got a decent reminder of old England while I was there to help prevent homesickness.

If any reader is learning a foreign language and has got a fair grip on grammar and a moderate vocabulary already under his belt, so to speak, may I recommend first tackling in the language concerned little magazines like Mickey Mouse, Pluto and Donald Duck (in Italian, for example, Donald Duck is "Paperino) These can be purchased cheaply enough from most local newspaper stands and as aids to learning the everyday language of the street are superb. Add to this the fact that you don't - thanks to the drawings - have to wade through paragraphs of description of scenes before you get to the dialogue.
And, as if that weren't enough, they can be gently amusing too. Highly recommended reading for language learners.

I vividly recall the pleasure I derived as a boy from discovering books that, on those windy, rainy nights of the late 1960s, took me on adventures way beyond my time and quiet suburb. One such, was Buchan's brilliant The Three Hostages, which featured a politician who specialised in hypnosis. In the book, the politician never got to Downing street. In reality, Mr Blair did, and then disappeared before the house fell down.
In the main, Mr Hitchens, you write, and speak, for more people than you probably realise. The madness of, in particular, the last 12 years needs the scalpel. More power to your blade!

I love the way you methodically demolish the arguments of the various nation hating liberal pinkos that regularly attack you on this blog.

These are the people whose fellow travellers have spent the last 20-30 years trying to marginalise any literature that reflects the golden and great achievements of western civilisation (because its all 'nasty' and 'imperialist' and yes, there are winners and losers, an unforgivable sin as far as the left is concerned). As a result, our children are force fed ghastly PC fluff that is designed to make them 'better' people but in reality destroys any love they may have for literature and dumbs down their knowledge of the rich heritage of the English language (hence the birth of the debased 'innit' sub-dialect where one is forced to consider that many young people can barely speak).

A shocking state of affairs, that the 'Conservative' party will probably do nothing to redress.

Perhaps “silly” was the wrong word, but my point was that books that had originally been intended for adults became books intended for children. This was just me being pedantic; I tend to agree that children should still be reading books of this quality. I acknowledge with what appears to be your sentiment, which is that children used to be encouraged to read “grown-up” writings.

Oh and in my opinion H.G. Wells’ best works were of the science fiction genre, which presented a lot more innovative comments on society than his other works. My point was that at school I was encouraged to read The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau, but not Mr. Polly et al. This was because the former were considered appropriate for children, whereas the latter were considered to be “serious” literature.

One of the books I read while at junior school was "Gulliver's Travels" - a book which today would probably be considered an adult book. My eldest son (soon to start at grammar school) is reading it now having just finished reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost World". I loved Jules Verne when I was a kid, but the problem with his books today is that the "technology" which Verne refers to as futuristic now seems so dated and archaic to modern kids.

As for the idea that the mainstream parties are parties of the centre - well, that depends on what you consider to be centrist politics. The Tories have moved massively to the left over the last 30 years or so. The party led by David Cameron would be considered a party of the left to the Conservative Party of fifty years ago.

The "centre ground" has moved considerably thanks to the efforts of the likes of the BBC and other cultural influences, but the politics they espouse is still extreme left to many of us - and as you rightly point out, that has left many people disenfranchised. We have nobody to vote for so we don't vote. Remarkably, this process of moving the centre ground has only recently begun in the USA. Even as recently as ten years ago the leftist Democrat party would have been considered a party of the right in this country, but this is now changing with the emergence of Obama and the virtual collapse of Republican confidence.

But these things go in cycles. I've detected a sea change amongst the young who are increasingly tending towards real conservatism - moral, social and political. This isn't entirely surprising as they are the ones who are most affected by the leftist policies which have failed them so completely. My only real concern is that the slow motion coup d'etat may become irreversible before the sea change can sweep the progressives into the pages of history - irreversible due to constitutional changes that will make it impossible to reverse and our continued assimilation into a progressive empire - the EU.

To the list of childhood reading I would like add: The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Treasure Island, The Time Machine, and The Swiss Family Robinson, all 'borrowed' from my father's bookshelves; and many Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton books from my own. I can't say that I ever finished them all, but I clearly remember thumbing my way through them with a sense of youthful wonder. I also recall, at the slightly younger age of seven, reciting Psalm 23 (now forever etched on my memory) in front of my class at school, and during the same year leading an assembly and earning myself a highly sought after gold star. This was over 20 years ago now and I wonder whatever happened to those giant hymn sheets. Surely this was a great aid to learning to read? Maybe they're all rolled up and locked away with the cane and the abacus in a rusty old grey cabinet, awaiting a time when headmasters and headmistresses - or those who think they know better - will return to their senses.

It wasn't that the content of the books such as those written by Jules verne were considered silly in mid 20th century but rather they were considered to be wholesome and engaging tales for boys and girls.They were also very well written so were also considered to be beneficial from the educational point of view.Henty was another Victorian author that was very popular when I was a boy.His works are considered totally off limits now by our left wing educational establishment.Robinson Crusoe nd The Arabian Nights were very popular with children in the nineteenth century,as Dickens illustrates in the imagination of the young Scrooge left alone at boarding school.H.G.Wells of course wrote many books that were not science fiction,his best works are not of that genre.Kipps,Mr.Polly,The wheels of chance,Anne Veronica for instance are great books that made serious comments on society.Children did enjoy them also and still would if they were educated to read them.

Mr. Hitchens wrote; "the things which had changed the country had been done in the open, not by conspiracies, and that gullible or lazy or incurious journalists hadn't noticed what was in front of their noses."

I disagree with the suggestion that journalists were unaware of the changes being made, I would contend that journalists (particularly BBC/Guardian types) are wholeheartedly supporting the changes that have been made and do not consider anything particularly radical to have occured. It is not a conspiracy, there was no organised meeting, it is simply the result of the fact that journalists and our pampered, middle-class revolutionaries share the same worldview and liberal values.

Having previously deplored the constant use of quotations as posters make their points, I hope I can be excused the following:

"Men are constantly engaged in an, on the whole successful, effort to adjust their ideas to circumstances and also in an effort, very much less successful, to adjust circumstances to ideas."

These seem wise words to me. They also suggest that attempting to turn the clock back to those days - that some may see as the time of 'true' conservatism - will be one mighty task. Apart from the absence of any single country that I can think of that we can point to and say 'it works there, why can't we do that', it will take decades to change the way we are, and the way many want to remain.

For those who feel the 'revolution' is just ahead of us, we should not forget that even after all the horrows of war and depression, it took some 15 years for major political changes to take place in 1930s' Germany. And that regime was, of course, prepared to use many unpleasant means to bring about such change.
How long will it take to install a government that not only agrees with some of the ideas of many posters on this site, but also has the ability to install the necessary legislation to bring such changes about? And in the meantime, all the current
'circumstances' will be even more embedded in our society.

I hate to be pedantic, but none of those works by the great Jules Verne or Conan Doyle were written with boys in mind. They were written for an adult audience (I accept that they were aimed at men) not specifically for children. Unfortunately, like many science fiction/ adventure stories of the Victorian period, they were relegated to children stories in the mid twentieth century as the genre was considered by many to be “silly”. H.G. Wells suffered a similar fate, despite the serious intent of his works.

Like today, children’s stories of the nineteenth century were much simpler than their adult counterparts. A comparison between the works you have mentioned and the works of Lewis Carroll and Hans Christian Anderson make this more obvious. However, I tend to agree with your reasoning that most children today would be unable to cope with these novels. I just about managed it when I was a child, but that was thanks largely to a sheltered upbringing and an overactive imagination.

"they certainly have mass appeal compared to the other parties we have the option of voting for."

I am keen to know what is so appealing about them (I go into more detail in the previous thread).

Also, I can't help noticing you have changed your statement slightly. Before, you said they had mass appeal and now you're saying only in comparison to the other parties, which changes the whole meaning of what you said.

Maybe I should rephrase my question- what is more appealing about the three main parties than any of the others?

Must admit though, I feel you're right when you say:

"My view, somewhat less exciting, is that it would simply struggle on - no doubt with power struggles, internal debates and all the rest of it - until the pendulum swings and its turn comes. "

I can't see it breaking up either- too many vested interests in its continuation as feeble opposition.

I really enjoyed your post and glad you decided to share it- as I am that you bought that dinosaur book for your son. As a once overly keen dinosaur hunter (yet to find any) I can fondly recall spending much time with a dinosaur book in front of me- Perhaps I was too influenced by those old 1970s classic Doug McClure movies (Land that Time Forgot/Warlords of Atlantis etc)- but I always imagined going off exploring with my mates (not very far coz didn't want to be late for tea) and bumping into a huge dinosaur, which nobody knew the name of- enter yours truly who would stun everyone by coming out with a really unpronouncable name and telling everyone to run for their lives- happily I have abandoned that particular fantasy, although I do still dream of one day studying paleontology- definitely missed my calling there...

I digress- the point I was making (albeit poorly) is that any youngster (at least from my experience) inerested in dinosaurs is always very keen to know as much about them as possible. It may become a lifelong passion- who knows- or dares to dream???

Your house sounds very explorable by the way...

Hello Ken

"Yet there is something indefinably Victorian about King and his work."

I really enjoyed some of his early stuff- IT, the Stand, Salem's Lot etc- You may be interested to read Stephen King's Danse Macabre. In it he talks about all his early influences- and I particularly liked the following:

"Disbelief isn’t light it’s heavy…it takes a sophisticated and muscular intellectual to believe, even for a little while, in Myarlathotep, the Blind Faceless One, the Howler in the Night. And whenever I run into someone who expresses a feeling along the lines of “I don’t read fantasy or go to any of those movies, none of it’s real,” I feel a kind of sympathy. They simply can’t lift the weight of fantasy. The muscles of the imagination have grown too weak."

I think he makes an excellent point here- and it's very relevant to this particular thread (at least the first part). Given the increasingly widespread illiteracy, or (at the very least) neglect of reading that seems to be becoming commonplace in Britain I wonder what the future holds when our imagination dwindles. (I sometimes think that some of the hard-core evolutionsist on here who are constantly demanding scientific proof for everything suffer from this to some extent).

Also, if you like Stephen King you will definitely like Robert R McCammon as they do share similarities. He is very under-rated but far superior to King in my view (and that's not knocking Stephen King). Wolf's Hour, Swan Song and Mystery Walk, not to mention Speaks the Nightbird volumes I and II (historical detective novels) are all superb!

I think you are mistaken in assuming that the policies of the present-day mainstream parties (Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat) have "mass appeal". I think the true situation is this: that these parties continue (for the moment) to enjoy mass support, which is not at all the same thing. (This support, however, would be shown for what it is if elections allowed mass abstentions to be officially acknowledged.)

This is because of the tribal nature of politics in this country. A person's political affiliations are often no more rational than their support of a football team. For example, many white working-class voters in England, who actually hold views on moral, social and political matters diametrically opposed to those of the present-day Labour Party, nevertheless continue to vote for them out of a combination of habit and tribal loyalty ("My father voted Labour, and his father before him...").

I do not think you have read Mr Hitchens carefully enough. He does not expect a Conservative Party collapse at the next General Election. He merely foresees that, whatever the outcome of that election, the Conservative Party will have been shown to be an ineffective opposition party. By its embrace of policies formerly associated with New Labour, it will be New Labour that is vindicated, whether the Conservative Party wins or loses. Mr Hitchens has been at great pains to explain that many genuinely conservative people have hitherto clung to the Conservative Party because they have nowhere else to go (although there are early signs of a haemorrhaging of votes to UKIP and the BNP from both the Conservative and Labour parties, which I think is set to continue apace).

Mr Hitchens has repeatedly stated that the Conservative Party cannot continue to depend upon the support of genuinely conservative voters while pursuing policies barely distinguishable (if at all) from those of New Labour or the Liberal Democrats. He is implacable in his opposition to the BNP, and does not view them as a palatable alternative to the mainstream parties, although he understands the frustrations that have driven many into the BNP's embrace. He merely views the eventual electoral collapse of the Conservative Party as a necessary, not sufficient, condition for the formation of a new, genuinely conservative party, with the kind of mass appeal you (erroneously, I believe) attribute to the existing mainstream parties.

I understand that it was merely a rhetorical device (albeit a rather silly one), but I am sure you realise that there are many more than 20 people in this country who share the anxieties, and many of the views, of Peter Hitchens and the conservative posters on this forum.

‘My main point being that it seems childish to me (or indeed "silly" as Mr Hitchens would have it) to blame the fact that the significant political parties don't really reflect your world view upon a conspiracy, with no evidence to back it up . . . This is essentially the standard conspiracy theorists defence when all else fails (just because it hasn't been proved, doesn't mean it isn't happening.)’

Posted by: Terry O'Brien | 19 August 2009 at 06:04 PM

This sort of stuff is excruciating (and there are plenty of leftists in the ‘conspiracy’ field, by the way, Chomsky for one, Pilger and Naomi Klein for two more – they carefully look at half the equation – the ‘Capitalist’ – and ignore the ‘Communist’ – but they are there. As I always state, they meet at the top, Capitalism is Super Communism and vice versa. For the record, I personally resent the Hegelian use of the terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ and believe they are almost the best weapons the Globalists have, but we have to go along with existing paradigms to an extent.)

Honestly, just trawl through my last umpty umpty posts here going way, way back and they are absolutely full of names, dates, places, essential texts written by essential insiders, references to thousands and thousands of pages of books and documents that detail the inner workings of the continuum of Political and Cultural conspiracy. You’d have to sift through all my other myriad detours and bypasses etc, but there is still enough smoking artillery there to shell Leningrad to Kingdom Come.

You don’t even want to paddle in the shallow end of the Ocean of Truth, my friend.

Always the line goes through my head ‘None so blind as those that will not see.’

As one of Mr O' Brien 20 fanatisists. I presume he belongs to the other portion of our total population minus us twenty. I am filled with forboding.
I have always been of the opinion that most voters are not loyal to his version of the centre left right. In fact they only venture to the polling station to vote against a party in order to punish it for four or more years of broken promise.
If one feels that this is centre politics and therefore the domain of the sensible rather than the fantasists then god help us all.
According to this chap we have seen the demise of a land that ruled the civilised world, to a place where we follow other states like a lap dog in as is Mr Hitchens contention, to globalise the world. In fact a laughing stock.
Thats democracy under this particular two party system. Can someone please tell me when the electorate of Britain decided that this was to be so.
If the truth be known it was probably when we decided to vote out parties instead of vote in parties.
Oh and by the way Mr Hitchens Iraq is oil rich. And Afghanistan geographically important for a gas and oil pipe to supply the West. Are our boys dying to support guarantees of oil and gas for Europe and America plus of course the heroin trade or even worse a corrupt regime. Is that just another fantasist idea. the terms of which seem to upset Mr O'Brien. Or is this here in Britain a corrupt Regime and fantasists like Mr O'Brien keeping it thus

Ha, I got a response, was it abusive? I didn't think so, I was merely referring to the article's descent into blaming every single 'problem' on Labour, such as:

"Combine this political and cultural position with the most radical constitutional reform since Cromwell, the break-up of the Kingdom, the destruction of the independent features of the House of Lords, the passing of reserve legislation which could turn the country into a dictatorship overnight, the creation of the surveillance society, the use of the terrorist bogey to convert the police into a state gendarmerie with unlimited power, the politicisation of the judiciary, the politicisation and centralisation of the police, the co-option of the BBC, the sidelining and isolation of the monarchy and the usurpation of its position, and the political domination of much of the media and almost all the universities, and put that next to the extraordinary moves to increase the power of the executive at the expense of the Cabinet and the Commons, and you have something really rather alarming."

It's a long list, some of which I find more tangible than others, I agree with some of it, but for the most part I found it excessive and therefore took the view that it was paranoid, Labour are responsible for 'the sidelining and isolation of the monarchy'? Sorry, but it seemed a bit paranoid to me to include such a non-issue seemingly for the sake of it, and I was hardly alone in pointing out paranoia, sorry if 'mad raving' made you think I was actually calling you mad, I'll happily withdraw that if it caused offence, but 'paranoid' stays

it's also interesting that I've addressed your arguments with more vigour many times before and they have been ignored, and yet when I make a more flippant remark (because I'm not hugely interested in examining Labour's marxist members) I get called on it - do you take the better remarks on board and only argue with the simple ones? You say you don't want the non-responsive stuff - and yet you frequently respond to it, surely that's just breeding more idiotic comments?

Then call my name silly...thanks, really taking the moral high-ground there

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